Carolyn
Horwitz is a veteran editor and writer. Her latest
book is Dealer's Choice: At Home With Purveyors of
Antique and Vintage Furnishings.

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Pop-up restaurants—those fleeting eateries that once served as
culinary experiments for only the most plugged-in foodies—have
entered the mainstream, and increasing numbers of chefs are
setting up temporary shops in other people’s kitchens.

What’s in it for these nomadic restaurateurs, who ostensibly
would rather be running their own establishments, and for their
hosts, who allow outsiders to take over their businesses?

Are pop-ups a legitimate model with staying power, or simply
vanity projects for lauded but unemployed chefs?

The pop-up is said to have originated in 2007 in Los Angeles with
Ludobites, a mobile restaurant led by chef Ludo Lefebvre. Now
that his "here today, gone tomorrow" concept has caught on
nationally—chefs surveyed by the National Restaurant Association
have named pop-ups, along with food trucks, as the biggest
expected industry trend for 2011—reality TV has come calling.

While Lefebvre has capitalized on the concept, the primary goal
of most chefs who turn to pop-ups—usually after losing their own
kitchens—is to remain in the public eye.

“It’s all about staying relevant,” says François Renaud, manager
and sommelier of the pop-up Quartier, which operated in May from
the kitchen of a café/market in Toluca Lake outside of Los
Angeles. “Even more so in big cities. You tend to be forgotten
pretty fast. If you stay away for awhile, you’re as good as
dead.”

Quartier's diver
scallop with fava beans, orange, and tomato.

On Saturday and Sunday nights in May, Renaud’s partner in
Quartier, chef Gary Menes, churned out six- and seven-course
tasting menus for around $55 per person (without wine).
Dishes—such as asparagus served with a 62-degree egg, or tri-tip
with bone-marrow crouton, potato, baby leeks, and poached
radish—showcased market-driven local ingredients. The venue was
the casual spot Olive & Thyme, which is typically closed on
weekend evenings.

Menes, a veteran of the French Laundry who has helmed kitchens at
acclaimed L.A.-area restaurants such as Marché and Palate Food +
Wine, says the pop-up was a way to tell his fans, “ ‘Hey, here we
are, I know you’ve been jonesing for some of that pork belly I
make.’ To kind of remind people that we’re still here.”

The Bottom Line

Every pop-up has its own financial arrangement with its host
kitchen, and everything is negotiable. Some agree to a split of
sales; others pay a flat rental fee. In some cases, a restaurant
will host a pop-up for nothing more than publicity and exposure
to a new type of clientele. The host kitchen’s staff may be
utilized, or a pop-up may bring in its own. Often, staffers are
paid under the table.

Quartier was self-financed by Menes and Renaud, who paid the
café’s owners, Melina and Christian Davies, 25 percent of
profits, according to Menes. The fee covered use of the Olive
& Thyme point-of-sale and accounting systems, as well as
water, electricity, gas, and wear-and-tear on the facility.

“Everything is on a consultant basis,” Menes says. “That
helps us out liability-wise. It helps as far as taxing is
concerned. Once we pay them, they report to the IRS, and it’s all
clean.”

Chef Gary
Menes.

Menes says he and Renaud had a solid idea of what they would
bring in, based on the prix-fixed menu price, and had budgeted
their costs at 30 percent for food, 25 percent for labor, and 20
percent for beverages (purchased under Olive & Thyme’s
beer-and-wine license). At the beginning of the pop-up’s run, he
says, they were making enough to cover expenses; by the end they
had turned a small profit.

Melina Davies confirms that Olive & Thyme took a cut of
Quartier’s profits. But, she says, hosting the pop-up had other
benefits—including the obvious perk of getting diners in at times
the restaurant would normally be closed.

“It’s a way for our customers to get their weekend fix,” she
says, and, for the counter-service café, “it’s a really great way
to give our customers a formal dining experience.” But the real
prize was the exposure and cachet that came from being associated
with a prominent chef.

“Gary is known everywhere, so to have people who follow him see
what we’re about is a great thing,” Davies says. “It makes us
more legitimate, in a sense, as being real foodies.”

A Unique Proposal

Chef Laurent Quenioux, celebrated in L.A. culinary circles for
his elaborate, avant-garde preparations, shuttered his latest
restaurant, Bistro LQ, in March. In June, he began cooking
five-course menus Sunday through Tuesday, every other week, in
the most unlikely of places: Starry Kitchen, a casual, pan-Asian
spot, whose owner, Nguyen Tran, has been known to promote his
crispy tofu balls by wearing a banana suit and carrying a sign
saying, “Please enjoy our balls in your mouth.”

Starry Kitchen itself has roots in “underground” dining: The
scrappy restaurant, which opened downtown in 2010, evolved from
an illegal eatery that Tran and his wife, Thi, hosted in their
apartment.

When Quenioux lost his restaurant, Tran says, “I reached out to
him really quickly. I said, ‘I want to give you a unique
proposal. I want you to rebrand yourself, and I want you to do it
here, because this is the least likely place people will look for
you.’ ”

Indeed, Quenioux, whose pop-up venture is
called LQ@SK, is keen to engage in what he calls “bistronomy”:
serving haute cuisine in a casual setting.

“We want to be able to focus and spend money on ingredients, and
not to have all the formal, expensive things that come with a
restaurant,” he says. One of his goals is to “democratize” fine
dining, so that “people can have foie gras and sweetbreads and
don’t need to go to a $100 restaurant.”

Those items were indeed on the first week’s menu at LQ@SK—the
foie gras in the form of a teriyaki served with oxtail, rabbit
meatballs, miso, and yuzu; the Asian-style sweetbreads marinated,
lightly fried, and served with shishito peppers and wild
mushrooms. The entire five-course meal, plus amuse
bouche, sold for $45, without tax and tip.

Tran says Starry Kitchen is taking a cut of less than 20 percent
to cover costs such as water and electricity; he is also
advancing the cost of Quenioux’s food through his existing credit
line and is attempting to keep those costs at a manageable 30
percent of gross. “All of his processing goes through my system,
so I have to pay him out…I can see how much I spent and how much
he made. So there is a clear accounting.”

While both Tran and Quenioux are profiting from the venture, Tran
says, at the end of the day, “it’s a long-term investment of
time, not necessarily money. I want to build our brand as well.”
The benefits for him, he adds, are obvious. “We get back in the
press; people are like, ‘These aren’t just goofballs in banana
suits; they have relations with renowned chefs.’ ”

Quenioux, who changes the menu constantly, says the on-again,
off-again schedule is a boon for experimentation. “It allows me
to be so creative, really take my time, go to this market, that
market, go to the countryside … I would not be able to do that in
my own restaurant, because it’s day-in, day-out.”

Menes feels differently; he saw his pop-up as simply a means to
an end—namely, opening his own restaurant. “Cooking is natural
for me,” he says. “That’s a given. What’s not a given is to see
if your concept works, makes money, and if your budget model
works. That’s what’s most important about this whole practice.
It’s not cooking; it’s not farmer friends … but is this a viable
business model?”

At the end of the day, what’s most important to Menes is to
attract financing, “to be able to say, ‘This is what we do;
here’s what it tastes like. If you enjoy that, come invest with
us.’ ”

Hermit Crabs In The Kitchen

Operating a restaurant in borrowed space can be a logistical
nightmare.

Faced with limited storage facilities at Olive & Thyme,
Renaud each day brought in, then removed, such items as
glassware, napkins (personally hand-stamped with the Quartier
logo), cheese boards, carafes, and decorative candles. “It’s very
much like starting a new restaurant every day,” Renaud says. “You
have to utilize a few hours to your best advantage.”

“It’s a pain in the neck,” Menes says plainly. Every shift, the
self-described hermit crab transported his own advanced cooking
equipment, such as a Cryovak and four immersion circulators.
There was little room for elaborate prep work; Menes handled much
of that at home or at a friend’s kitchen near the restaurant. The
dearth of storage made shopping for fresh ingredients a
challenge—pop-up managers must take special care not to
overbuy—and the lack of a walk-in refrigerator forced Menes to
keep food in picnic chests packed with dry ice.

Despite the hardships, would he do it again? “Absolutely,” says
Menes, whose goal is to sign a lease in early 2012 for his own
restaurant, which he would preview during the construction phase
with a pop-up in January or February, “right in time for truffle
season.”

Starry Kitchen, meanwhile, has a bigger space, with ample storage
and a walk-in refrigerator and freezer. For LQ@SK, Quenioux
brings in his own fine-dining dishes and silverware and does most
of the prep for each three-day run on Sundays, when Starry
Kitchen is closed. For waiters, runners, and kitchen staff, he
uses many of the people who worked with him at Bistro LQ, and
fills in the holes with Starry Kitchen staffers and culinary
students who work as unpaid externs.

Starry Kitchen has no liquor license. However, for LQ@SK, Tran
admits, “we’re not discouraging people from bringing recreational
beverages to pair with recreational foods.”

LQ@SK, after taking a few weeks off in July, will run through the
summer and possibly longer. “Why not keep it going while we’re
having fun?” Tran says.

Fanning The Flames

Like gourmet food trucks—which rely on the blogosphere to spread
word of their ever-changing locations in real time—pop-ups use
social media as their principal, and often only, means of
publicity. The rise of consumer-targeted social media marketing,
not to mention recent media coverage such as Lefebvre’s TV show,
has helped shift the pop-up from an insiders-only phenomenon to a
more accessible movement.

Hardcore foodies are already plotting new experiences reserved
for the privileged few. Some pop-ups are moving from restaurants
to home kitchens, morphing into ultra-exclusive supper clubs.
Meanwhile, The New York Times has reported on a
planned Manhattan version of the “Dîner en Blanc,” the highly
secretive annual Paris event whose guest list consists of
“trusted friends who invite their own trusted friends.”

Still, the days of gimmicky concepts may be waning, as
ever-more-savvy consumers seek to regain control of their dining
experiences. Menes cites the cyclical nature of restaurants,
which for now seem to focus squarely on the whims of chefs, not
patrons. “It used to be that a tasting menu was a novelty, and
now it’s mainstream,” he says, pointing out that pop-up customers
rarely have a say in what they eat and are forced to accept fixed
prices. “It used to be that people liked choosing.”

In other words, the young people who now enjoy pop-ups may in a
few years be clamoring for a return to a more traditional dining
experience: à la carte menus, in enduring, comfortable
restaurants that put customer service first.